America 250: A Republic ... If You Can Teach It
Surveying the past and the future of American Education
By Garion Frankel
The American experiment would not have lasted 250 years without a sustained commitment to educational excellence. Our forefathers understood that a republican society could not survive without an educated citizenry, replete with the moral virtues, intellectual and physical aptitudes, and devotion to duty necessary for effective participation in public life.
That core purpose — to cultivate virtuous citizens prepared for republican government — was American education’s North Star for more than a century. But this emphasis on civilization stewardship has long had to contend with a technocratic desire to train students to be productive, efficient worker bees. In recent decades, the technocrats have gained the upper hand.
As we prepare for the United States’ most joyous semiquincentennial, it is worth revisiting our nation’s education system: where we’ve come from, where we stand today, and where we might be headed next. It is also essential to revisit the enduring struggle between virtue and technocracy, and illuminate why reclaiming American education’s moral foundation is not just desirable, but necessary.
The town of Boston founded the continent’s first public school in 1635. The Boston Latin School offered a rich, humanities-based curriculum that would later produce visionaries and revolutionaries like Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Its success would alter New England’s educational landscape forever. Indeed, by the time of the American Revolution, 90 percent of New England’s white men and nearly half of its white women were literate — the highest literacy rate in the world at the time — many of them having been educated in the region’s public schools.
The United States’ commitments to educational excellence and civic virtue were not limited to New England. In the Mid-Atlantic, the region’s diverse ethnic and religious groups were primarily responsible for children’s education, combining classical aptitudes with Enlightenment moral formation. In the South, a robust mosaic of private schools competed against one another for students, and while literacy rates were never quite as high as in New England, advertising records indicate that many of these schools lasted for decades. But even these country gentlemen often became revolutionaries.
It must, of course, be understood that education was not available to all Americans. Women, the poor (especially outside of New England), and people from minority religions were often denied access to formal schooling. Black Americans endured the harshest restrictions. While a handful of tuition-free schools served free Blacks in the North, slaves, especially in the South, could not access an education (at least beyond religious instruction) at all. Nevertheless, many resisted, teaching themselves or their children through illicit books or oral folklore.
The nineteenth century brought great change to the United States, and education was no exception. As the nation industrialized, millions of immigrants arrived to their new home, and the scourge of slavery erupted into civil war, the contours of educational conflict, including questions about education’s very purpose, began to solidify. Education was no longer solely the core of moral or civic virtue — it had to do something obvious for society.
Though this argument appeared earlier in the works of Thomas Paine, Massachusetts’ Horace Mann made it influential. If the American public school system as we know it can be attributed to one person, it’s Horace Mann. He agreed that education should be devoted to moral and intellectual formation, but took this argument much further — public schools, he believed, should be society’s great equalizer. If implemented properly, public schools could reduce crime, mitigate poverty, promote national unity, and serve as the backbone for a stable republic.
Mann’s ideas, and sheer competence, drove a national movement for public schooling. By the end of the century, as many Americans attended public schools as private schools. But Mann’s common school movement was not unambiguously good. Mann, and his movement, were rigid, uncomfortable with dissent, and championed a secularized Calvinism that was nevertheless obvious in its orientation. It gave traditionalists in government (and education) a weapon to use against a population that was increasingly religiously diverse and cosmopolitan.
And use that weapon they did. The so-called “Public School Wars” dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century. Educational authorities used public schools as an ideological tool meant to turn Irish Catholics, Tejanos from southern Texas, German Lutherans, and Ashkenazi Jews, among many others, into Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Black Americans too, particularly the Southern descendants of freed slaves, were targets of similar efforts, though these were rooted in segregation rather than assimilation.
Though these groups fought hard, and often successfully, for their cultures and educational identities to survive, many had little choice but to assimilate. By the early 20th century, even many of the robust parochial school systems were more like the public schools than not.
This rapid pace of change, as well as the longstanding emphasis on culture, led to a Progressive backlash. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Progressives — led by figures like John Dewey, Jane Addams, Maria Montessori (who was Italian, but broadly influential), and Margarethe Schurz — argued that students are social beings, and that schools should not only be a site of learning, but a place where students can learn how to “advance” and reshape society.
Schools, they asserted, are not places where students learn universal truths or republican principles. They are instead places where students experience and explore the world, learn to solve problems, and have facilitators to gently nudge them towards social responsibility.
This perspective was transformational, mostly for the worst. The Progressives pushed children to become activists, and the activism often just so happened to coincide with Progressive political interests.
They replaced universal truths and republican virtue with social responsibility and the child’s self-expression (but no child is naturally curious about phonics or multiplication tables). They created strong unions, which only took a few decades to become cronyist political appendages. They, contrary to their stated objective for children’s self-expression, pushed for standardization and centralized control, steamrolling over local educational traditions all around the country. Moreover, by rejecting direct instruction — a teacher standing at the front of the room, telling students what they need to know — the Progressives rejected thousands of years of tradition and cognitive science.
But the Progressive affection for social change through education did pay important dividends. Progressives fought for underserved groups — women, ethnic and racial minorities, and the poor — to have equal access to education. They forced American society, often kicking and screaming, to recognize that they had restricted educational excellence and civic virtue to elite Whites. They supported immigrants’ educational aims, empowering them to become learned Americans.
Most importantly, they were in the Civil Rights Movement’s trenches, illustrating that separate-but-equal was both immoral and unequal.
Historical and institutional developments sprouted the Civil Rights Movement in education. The United States was a rising power by this point, which enhanced the complexity, breadth, and standardization of the broader public education system. School finance formulas, standardized tests, widespread college attendance, and the societal emphasis on math and science all became commonplace during this period. This push for truly universal education also applied to ethnic and racial minorities, though it remained “unseemly” to educate them in the same schools as White children.
But by educating the people they wanted to oppress, the old, racist elite planted the seeds of their own downfall. Black law students embraced the Constitution to fight for their rights. Scholars like W.E.B Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, though personal rivals, both pushed for Black educational empowerment. Latinos, indigenous Americans, and Asian-Americans also joined the battle for educational rights. In 1954, Brown v. Board addressed what should have been obvious from the beginning — that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
By the late 20th century, the ideal of equal education had become widely accepted in principle, if inconsistently applied in practice. Meanwhile, the culture of American schooling itself began to settle into familiar patterns. At this stage, school began to really look like school.
Bullies, lockers, teen drama, and boring teachers were the name of the game. However, important issues simmered under the surface. Federal busing efforts tried, and failed, to promote diversity in public schools. Reformers, seeing bureaucratic bloat and lower test scores, introduced strict accountability (think No Child Left Behind), and new educational models (think charter schools and private school vouchers) to try and stop the bleeding. School prayer became a major point of controversy, presaging the culture wars of today.
Technology penetrated classrooms with mind-boggling speed, as many districts went from SmartBoards to iPads to AI tutors in a decade. The COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns accelerated this trend — not only was technology being used in the classroom, it was now a necessity (quite possibly to the detriment of student learning). Parents often did not like what they were seeing, leading to widespread attacks against critical race theory, renewed interest in educational freedom, and a general desire for American education to go back to its roots.
As we look to the future, this desire for the education of old will likely dominate discussion for years to come. Classical schools, which aim to replicate the Greco-Roman model of the early United States, are growing exponentially. More and more parents are choosing not to enroll their children in public schools (and more and more states are giving them the leeway to make that choice). Parents are demanding more of American schools — not in the form of test scores or college and career readiness, but in virtue.
It is fitting that next year marks the semiquincentennial, as we now face a foundational choice: Will we re-embrace the morality-based education that sustained us for 250 years, or will we continue to worship at technocracy’s altar, hoping to be blessed with higher test scores and workforce readiness?
The answer matters. Our republic’s survival depends on more than economic output. It relies on future generations having character, and wisely governing both themselves and others. A virtue-based education would ignore neither skills nor the economy — it simply places them in service of the good.
As past-reverent but forward-thinking movements like Freedom Conservatism articulate, this requires restoring freedom of conscience and returning educational decision-making to those most invested in developing children’s moral character — their families. These are not nostalgic ideas, nor are they bound to any one ideology or tradition. Instead, if we want America’s quincentennial to be as celebratory as our semiquincentennial, American education must once again place civic and moral formation at its heart.
Garion Frankel is the Aviles-Johnson doctoral fellow in PK-12 educational leadership at Texas A&M University. He is a Young Voices Middle East History and Peace fellow, and his work has appeared in outlets like USA Today, RealClearPolitics, Newsweek, and the Houston Chronicle.